Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 17, 2010 @05:22PM
from the well-it-ain't-baseball dept.

sciencehabit excerpts from an interesting report on statistics for soccer, in the stats-obsessed world of sports: "Only a handful of soccer ranking systems exist, most of which rely on limited information: the number of goals scored in a match, the number of goals assisted, and some indices of a match's difficulty and importance. ... So researchers turned to an unlikely source: social networks. Applying the kinds of mathematical techniques used to map Facebook friends and other networks, the team created software that can trace the ball's flow from player to player. As the program follows the ball, it assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal. Whether the shot succeeds doesn't matter. Only the ball's flow toward the goal and each player's role in getting it there factors into the program's point system, which then calculates a skill index for each team and player."

But you get 1st downs, which has nothing comparable in soccer. It also can put you in field goal range, which has no parallel in soccer. In US football, the team with the most offensive yards almost always wins. Does soccer have a similar outcome? And in US football, yards are only counted FORWARD. If the fullback runs 30 yards left, then 30 yards right, then is tackled on the line of scrimmage, he has gained exactly zero yards. Comparing to US football isn't a fruitful exercise, they are just too dif

If NFL football is chess, soccer is go. The difference? It actually requires talent to be good at goh, whereas a supercomputer can beat anyone at chess. Skilled athletes excel at soccer, overweight drug addicts who should have failed out of high school win football games.

Drug addicts? Racist much? I think the NFL does a good job at keeping illicit drugs AND performance enhancing drugs out of the league.

And not very many NFL athletes "fail out of high school". As a matter of fact, very few NFL players get into the NFL without going to college. Would you like to tell me about the 16-year old English phenoms, how they go right into EPL feeder leagues, and how THEIR education worked out for them after failing A-levels and finishing school at 16?

I play soccer and not football, but I'm not going to pretend that the reason more people in the world play soccer because it's hard. More people play soccer in the world because it's relatively easy and all you need is a flat space and a round object. Because it is easy (but hard to perfect) is what makes it the beautiful game. NFL football is not subtle but it is not easy. I played in a third-tier professional German soccer league (as an American), but regardless of my skill, I'd never be able to play professional American Football at ANY level.

I take it no american football game has ever been won by one "score" (no idea how the points works for american football). Giving a "score" more points doesn't make it any less close if there's only one "score" difference.

I get the impression that it's more like Rugby, though, with different types of "score" giving a different point value. Oh, and with body armour, totally non-fluid gameplay, and game times which rival Test cricket.

In American football, we inflate the scores. If you get it across the goal line, you get SIX points. If you can't run/catch it past that line, but decide to kick it in instead, you get THREE points.

If you break down an American football game typical score like 24-17 into 1 point for running/catching ball past the goal line and half a point for kicking it, that would be something like 3.5-2.5, which is roughly equivalent to a 1-nil victory in soccer.

I stand alone against my countrymen in this argument. Bigger is not better, my fellow Americans.

I have to take you on about the long game play though. The reason for the long games (three hours) is television and commercials. That's another reason soccer is not popular in the US, because it would require the TV channels to broadcast two uninterrupted 45 minute halves. Since TV here is dominated by advertisement money, soccer isn't financially viable for the networks because they can't sell commercials during the game.

I thought the games were long because half of the time was spent chatting about tactics and re-setting game play. And celebrating Baseketball-style. But I can totally agree that stopping gameplay for commercial breaks is worthwhile.

Yes, you can prove that the ball isn't being kicked "back and forth" by watching 15 minutes of match analysis. The English shows are very good at this (when Rupert Murdoch doesn't have a pay-per-view monopoly) as are the Germans. I imagine the Spanish and Italians are too. American sports tv? Not so much, and and that's why we don't like soccer because all we see is a ball being kicked back and forth. It's just like my English friends who think US Football is just running into a pile then resting for 30

Yes, in general the team with the longest possession, most corner shots and most penalties (in an offensive, goal-able position) for them usually wins. There are already a few comparable statistics in place to gauge whole teams, but estimating the "game value" of a certain player is often rather hard. A player may be "valuable" just by being on the field without a single ball contact. There are players who have to be covered tightly so they CANNOT touch the ball and cannot be a sensible place to pass to, because there is ALWAYS an opponent with him. His value lies in the ability to tear apart the defense of the opponent because he has to have a watchdog, often two. He will not be counted as "valuable" in this new scoring system, even though he is probably one of the most valuable players in the team.

It's like using yards carried for football and considering the offense line useless because they don't really carry the ball anywhere.

That's what's great about soccer though. You can dominate all the stats, time-of-possession, corner kicks, chances...but all that matters is goals. It's the ultimate "bottom line" sport, which gives fans lots of time to bitch and complain about "we should have won because...". It's fun.

It really isn't up to a midfielder/playmaker whether or not the final shot in an attack he helped create will be a good one or not. Hence the only fair way to evaluate that aspect of a player's game is to disregard whether the attack leads to a goal or not.

Well, as TFA mentions, "I am from Portugal, and I was disappointed in how we played Tuesday," he says. (His team tied 0-0 with Ivory Coast.) "I'm very curious to see what score the program gives us -- maybe we played better than I thought."

Sorry, dude, no matter what the program says, the result is still 0-0.

Or it could be because one player messed up a lot on each team (the one that actually shot).

Basically, this is just software that analyzes individual players performance leading up to shots - assists. Their JOB is to get the ball up to the striker. Their job is not necessarily to actually score. The scorers, though, get all the glory. Perhaps this software will help that?

Any football fan will tell you that when two teams play AMAZINGLY well the result will be more like 5-5 rather than 0-0.

I strongly disagree. There is much more than offense to consider in a good game of football. If the game results 5-5 it is rather clear that both defenses have failed at their job. Even a game ending 0-0 can be extremely interesting to watch for a football connoisseur. Football is not just about making goals, it's also about not conceding them.

Agreed, and this applies to other sports as well. A lot of the news of baseball over the past month or so dealt with perfect games by pitchers, in which the complete lack of offense by one of the teams was the interesting thing.

I think the mindset of more scoring = better game is mostly born out of casual fans, because scoring is generally exciting. Not that there's anything wrong with being a casual fan, but if that's all you're interested in being you should just accept that there are aspects of the game

Maybe the analysis it performs is better than the impression given by the article (yes, I RTFA, apologies), but it seems that it would give all the glory to the strikers and midfielders and undervalue the defenders and keeper, whose job is more about keeping the ball out of their net than getting it to the striker.

Soccer is a game of statistics. Get the ball close to the goal, and your chances of scoring go up. Whip a cross into the box or slip a ball through the defense, and there's a chance a teammate will be in the right place to manage to kick it toward the goal. Take a shot on target, and there's a chance it will get by the goalkeeper.

So anything that increases the likelihood of a shot on goal is increasing the likelihood of scoring, even if it's not the final step in the process, and even if it doesn't happen

Points for not scoring? Isn't that the same as a woman telling you that she just wants to be friends because your friendship means more than a relationship would?

No, it's like giving a guy points for how many numbers he gets and how many hot chicks actually flirt back with him. Then you can see who's better with the ladies even if you're comparing two Slashdotters and the scoreline would typically be a nil-all draw.

How about off-ball activity that contributes? Moving across a zone or defender to clear space for someone who actually handles the ball? What about the guy who makes a brilliant cut but doesn't get served well by a teammate, so never handles the ball?

What about defense?

Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where ball control and quality opportunities is more important than number of shots. You could game this system very easily by cranking shots from 30 yards.

Soccer doesn't lend itself well to statistical analysis of players. That's one of the things that makes it a beautiful sport and fun to discuss, IMO.

Defense is much harder than that. If I shut someone down and take their angles and force them to pass the ball backwards, I get 0 points. If I go for a tackle from a terrible angle and get blown by, I get the same. Even if you take away points, it's not able to count marking someone or positional play shutting things down. It just rewards defenders who are hard tacklers or good at poking a ball free.

From the journal article: "We take into account defensive efficiency by letting each player start a number of paths proportional to the number of balls that he recovers during the match."
However, you're right about movement off the ball.

I agree, basing the judgement on how the player handles the ball is missing most of what really goes on.Its not all about the ball.

Things are a bit more obvious in American Football, its obvious there that many players are never intended to interact with the ball at all. Instead their job is to block the other teams players and keep them out of the action, or to create a distraction, or to keep the other sides best players out of an area of the field due to threat of injury etc.

How about off-ball activity that contributes? Moving across a zone or defender to clear space for someone who actually handles the ball? What about the guy who makes a brilliant cut but doesn't get served well by a teammate, so never handles the ball?

Good point. As someone said below, an excellent defender may never get anywhere near the ball, because he has his mark so completely shut down that no-one ever passes to them.

As for Italian league players - the system also rewards control, doesn't it? Strings of successful passes etc? So their style of play where they pissfart around with the ball in the back line for half the game would still be scored well IF they then took those long chains of controlled passes and converted them into attempts on goal.

Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where falling on the ground and begging for a foul when another player is within arm's reach is more important than number of shots.

Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where falling on the ground and begging for a foul when another player is within arm's reach is more important than number of shots.

FTFY.

Can we please end this epidemic of acronym abuse? I'm fed up having to google for meanings all day long.

A simpler metric would be to assign the points for a match (0,1 or 3) to each individual player and then divide by number of matches played. The result would tell something about a player's effectiveness compared to his team mates, other footballers or even himself over the years (like whether he got better or whether a transfer was a good one).

Only if team makeups vary frequently. If a player plays on the same, fairly static team for a long time, then this system can't tell the difference between the player being bad, and the team being bad despite the player. Of course, you could say that sticking with a losing team for a long time is a sign of a bad player...

This problem could be offset somewhat by assigning a player points for taking control of the ball from the other team. It wouldn't be perfect, but it's an improvement.

You could also scale the points you award to the defensive player based on the number of points awarded in the current 'play' as well as the points of the passing player and potential receiving players. The idea being that the more touches on the ball one team has, the more progress the ball has made towards the goal and the skill level of the last opponent on the ball, the skill of the players who may have received the pass; all contribute to the importance of taking control of the ball.

It is less flawed than the current methods mentioned in the summary. In fact, it does MORE to measure the team effort than a metric like goals scored. This is what we might call an incremental improvement./facepalm

I assume there is already some kind of decent metrics for rating players to enable fantasy leagues - the sort where average joe picks a bunch of players (from all teams) that he likes, and compares his "fantasy team" to all the other average joes who choose to spend their time doing the same. What metrics do these fantasy leagues use?

Aussie rules football (AFL) has very specific player scoring, developed from the work of Champion Data [championdata.com.au] (not a large amount of detail there). These data and metrics are now us

Actually football (okay, soccer...) fantasy leagues follow quite simple metrics, it's just about goals, assists, yellow and red cards.Some system takes into account only individual stats, others also team stats (eg, a bonus for a defender if his real team doesn't concede goals).There may be some more or less convoluted bonus and combo rules (say, all your forwards score goals and all your defenders' teams don't concede...) but that's pretty much it.Here's an example:http://fantasy.premierleague.com/M/help.m

Actually, Fifa is currently running a World Cup fantasy league, which features rather diverse scoring system [fifa.com] for individual players. Players are awarded points for e.g. offensive and defensive action, scoring, and keeping a clean sheet. The scoring is also dependent on player's position on the field. It's not a perfect system, but works okay. IMHO, the system favours offensive wing backs, since they're often active in the offense, but are also egligible for the large bonus for shutting out the opponent. Of

Under those circumstances, Spain played an amazing game against Switzerland this week: Hundreds of accurate passes that ended in shots. More passes in one half than most teams make in an entire game. And yet, they didn't score, and lost the game against a team that had 25% ball position, but actually managed to score.

It would also mean that every Italian national team from the last 30 years happens to be terrible, despite their world championship titles.

If you've watched any English match in the past decade, you will see there are a slew of stats. When a player is on screen, stats are displayed such as: number of passes, % of passes completed, assists, shots, shots on target, tackles, total km run, and more.

On the other hand, as we've already had these stats for a decade or two we know how irrelevant they are. There are plenty of players that run around waving for the ball and when they get it simply knock it back or sideways in a manner that contributes little. They have great stats and may touch it in the build up to a goal but are far from being the architects.

Using the same software to analyse companies and creative team, mentioned in the article, that is a joke. As is the original researcher trying to understand why his team isn't winning when it only has one decent player.

There is a company called Champion Data that currently does a similar thing for Australian Rules football.
They generate player rankings based on a whole range of minutae. A pass is worth next to nothing if it is a short distance to an open teammate in the backline but worth a lot if it is a long accurate pass to a player in a dangerous position - and the player gets credit regardless of what happens next, so if they pass to a teammate in good position who fluffs the shot at goal, the passer still gets cre

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Please, stop using the word soccer. The real name of the game is FOOTBALL. It goes for that name in all the world but the US (even in Italy, even if there it is also called Calcio)
What americans call Football is called in the rest of the world American Football or US Footbal.
Regarding this scoring method, how would a player with an outsanding dribbling like Garrincha be rated?

There is only a handful of countries that need to distinguish between different football games. Most of the world has only one such a game, the one played in the World Cup right now, so calling it football is right in almost every country.

Even though I'm not a fan of football, I never call it soccer (which is slang for "association football").

Meanwhile, I'm always puzzled why American football is called "football" at all, since the whole point of football is that you kick a ball with your feet, you don't carry it. Having said that, rugby is also short for "rugby football", and American football is a derivation of rugby.

I don't really understand American football; it seems far more complicated and much slower than rugby.

Yes, but the A in USA (the official title of our country btw) is America. Does Chile call themselves the Uniformed Alliance of Chilean America? Are you going to get confused if I say America? Does he mean the US, or does he mean Chile?

The rest of the world calls us some form of "Amerika" in their own native languages, so why can't we?

Also, in Europe, you guys consider North and South America to be one continent, but we consider them to be two. So when North America consists of Canada, USA, and Mexico, I do

But United States is less specific than America. I think Mexico calls themselves the United States of Mexico, and I'm sure other countries do the same.

I don't know any North or South American countries that use the term America or American in their title, though (doesn't mean they don't exist, just sayin').

Also, in Arabic, it's Amreeka OR Weelayat alMutahida --which is Estados Unidos and Vereinigte Staaten"-- In any case, I can't think of another "American" country that uses America in their title. I'm op

Have the spectators estimate the player's worth. There's an old saying, everyone would be the better coach, even more than the better president. When you listen to soccer enthusiasts, they all know by far more about how much the players can and cannot do than the idiot coach that put the idiot up again while ignoring that spectator favorite.

Yes, these players won't be as "good". Most likely not. But let's look at the bottom of the reason for this ranking. Why do we want to rank players anyway? To find out h

Nobody really cares at about how well a team plays if that team never wins anything. Or: nobody cares how bad a team plays if it wins a trophy. You can play awfully but if you win the World Cup all your country will celebrate at least until the next day.

A metric could be more interesting for single players but again: if the computer says that you're good but you never win anything maybe your not so good. Getting in the right team at the right moment is also an important skill.

Surely you are aware of the fact that tracing that ball will be only the first step in curing cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, poverty, hunger, energy crisis, global warming AND bringing the balance to the Force?

You must mean tracing your balls and palpating the region. It's the most effective way to detect testicular cancer and get early treatment. Perhaps this algorithm could socially map our manhood's movements to see if they are ever get heavier on either side. FOR SCIENCE (and health)!

"I'm not a soccer fan but appreciate the World Cup. I'm sure the US would celebrate if it won the World Cup - it's quite an achievement.

Perhaps the US could ingratiate itself with other countries by becoming more involved in such events?

As has been posted already - the rest of the world is more than mildly interested in soccer (or 'football' as we call it in the UK - not to be confused with 'American football') - hence is it the most popular sport in the world. Worth a look-in maybe?"

I should read down the rest of this page to see if you're just trolling.

I tried to watch it...and just got a bit bored. The low scoring, and letting people tie just doesn't seem right to me for a competitive game.

What has the rate of scoring got to do with competitiveness? I'm kind of confused. Even baseball doesn't have humungously high scores.

Perhaps you'd prefer cricket, where a side can score several hundred points (known as 'runs') and take up to twenty wickets in a match.

As for ties. Only America thinks a draw is unacceptable in sport. The rest of the world copes quite easily with the concept.

Sometimes, just possibly, neither team is sufficiently better than the other to win the match. Why not allow the final score the reflect this?

Obviously this is the World Cup and so there'll be a knock-out cup format (instead of the league format, which is the current stage). As you can't knock someone out in the event of a draw (sorry, a 'tie') the rules permit the use of a couple of mechanisms to avoid this. First is a 30 minute period of extra time (erm, 'overtime'?) then there are penalties.

I don't understand that....I mean, I thought the world cup was analogous to to the Super Bowl in the US, something played every year to determine the champion.

Superbowl:- Annual- Play-off following league competition- Only involves American teams- Competed by professional sports clubs

World Cup:- Every four years- 2 year qualification involving regional qualifiers (in Europe taking the form of mini-leagues)- Involves the entire world- Competed by National teams

So no, not analogous to the Superbowl at all.

Is there not a soccer champion every year?

No. There are thousands.

E.g. the equivalent in Football terms to a Superbowl winner is whoever wins the MLS play-offs.

However, there are equivalents in the English Premier League, the Scottish Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the J League and.. well, every country has its own league competition, producing a champion.

Of course, there are also cup competitions. In England there's the League Cup, the FA Cup, the Johnson's Paint Trophy, the Community Shield and a number of lesser trophies competed for annually. There are also the Europe wide competitions such as the Intertoto Cup, the Europa League (which despite the name is a cup competition) and the Champions League (which despite the name is both a cup competition, and also involves non-champions).

Other continents have their own equivalents.

Each year there's also a World Club tournament, the winner of which are the World Club Champions.

Then there's the African Cup of Nations, which is a competition for national teams, which takes place at the start of each year.

Every four years (bisecting the world cup) there are the European Championships, in which the European national teams compete.

I'll stop now, but hopefully you at least have an inkling of just how much bigger this whole football thing is than something as inconsequential as the Superbowl in the US.

Even the creators of the Ignobel prize admit that some of the science that they're making fun of may one day turn out to be useful. Pascal was trying to prove 1=0 and therefore (in his own logic) God is infallible.. he failed, but in the process came up with loads of really useful mathematics and some decent philosophy to boot. Boole did the same thing and gave us boolean logic. Off the top of my head, the same science could vaguely (I'm just using this as an abstract example) be applied to Barnes Walla

ponckka team... can play as never before, and still loose, if they don't score.A team that plays very poorly, can score, and win.....

look at the world cup history, and the majority of soccer matches.

Look at the debut of spain in the world cup...

your software is really nice and the algorithm has to be great. but it doesn't apply in real life.thats why there arn't many stats in soccer, that is why is simple...GET THE BALL IN, thats what counts.And your algorithm is leaving that out immediatlyToday, 02:27:4

But if they don't get the ball in that may just be the fault of the striker. This is just a way to judge how well individual players play. It's easy to judge a striker on how many goals they scored, or a goalie on how many goals were saved, but for other players it's harder to pin down how good the player is simply using statistics.

If you want to judge how good the team is as a whole then counting goals is one way to go about it, but it's obviously a very poor method for ranking individual players..